Eating in Two or Three Languages

by Irvin S. Cobb

In March prices at the smarter café eating places had already advanced, I should say, at least one hundred per cent above the customary pre-war rates; and by midsummer the tariffs showed a second hundred per cent increase in delicacies, and one of at least fifty per cent in staples, which brought them almost up to the New York standards. Outside of Paris prices continued to be moderate and fair.

Just as I was about starting on my last trip to the Front before sailing for home, official announcement was made that dog biscuits would shortly be advanced in price to a well-nigh prohibitive figure. So I presume that very shortly thereafter the head waiters began offering dog biscuits to American guests. I knew they would do so, just as soon as a dog biscuit cost more than a lobster did.

Until this trip I never appreciated what a race of perfect cooks the French are. I thought I did, but I didn't. One visiting the big cities or stopping at show places and resorts along the main lines of motor and rail travel in peacetime could never come to a real and due appreciation of the uniformly high culinary expertness of the populace in general. I had to take campaigning trips across country into isolated districts lying well off the old tourist lanes to learn the lesson. Having learned it, I profited by it.

No matter how small the hamlet or how dingy appearing the so-called hotel in it might be, we were sure of getting satisfying food, cooked agreeably and served to us by a friendly, smiling little French maiden, and charged for at a most reasonable figure, considering that generally the town was fairly close up to the fighting lines and the bringing in of supplies for civilians' needs was frequently subordinated to the handling of military necessities.

Indeed, the place might be almost within range of the big guns and subjected to bombing outrages by enemy airmen, but somehow the local Boniface managed to produce food ample for our desires, and most appetising besides. His larder might be limited, but his good nature, like his willingness and his hospitality, was boundless.

I predict that there is going to be an era of better cooking in America before very long. Our soldiers, returning home, are going to demand a tastier and more diversified fare than many of them enjoyed before they put on khaki and went overseas; and they are going to get it, too. Remembering what they had to eat under French roofs, they will never again be satisfied with meats fried to death, with soggy vegetables, with underdone breads.

Sometimes as we went scouting about on our roving commission to see what we might see, at mealtime we would enter a community too small to harbour within it any establishment calling itself a hotel. In such a case this, then, would be our procedure: We would run down to the railroad crossing and halt at the door of the inevitable Café de la Station, or, as we should say in our language, the Last Chance Saloon; and of the proprietor we would inquire the name and whereabouts of some person in the community who might be induced, for a price, to feed a duet or a trio of hungry correspondents.

At first, when we were green at the thing, we sometimes tried to interrogate the local gendarme; but complications, misunderstandings, and that same confusion of tongues which spoiled so promising a building project one time at the Tower of Babel always ensued. Central Europe has a very dense population, as the geographies used to tell us; but the densest ones get on the police force.

So when by bitter experience we had learned that the gendarme never by any chance could get our meaning and that we never could understand his gestures, we hit upon the wise expedient of going right away to the Last Chance for information.

At the outset I preferred to let one of my companions conduct the inquiry; but presently it dawned upon me that my mode of speech gave unbounded joy to my provincial audiences, and I decided that if a little exertion on my part brought a measure of innocent pleasure into the lives of these good folks it was my duty, as an Ally, to oblige whenever possible.